Gmail's outage yesterday was reported by the FT as raising questions about cloud computing. We had a very frustrating issue a couple of weeks ago with our hosted e-mail filtering service.
It seems to come down to poor change management (in this case to do with active filtering but the details hardly matter). End result was that important e-mails started bouncing.
What really struck me was the helplessness. For services we run ourselves, we can quickly look at and identify issues, not go through some painful process of trying to convince someone else the fault lies with them. As usual my excellent team dropped everything as the problem manifested itself (at 7pm on a Saturday) but there was no way we could hope for that level of response from our supplier.
More fundamentally, we spend a lot of time and effort drilling into our own team that EVERY CHANGE goes through the change committee and is carefully considered, whereas a cloud supplier can do anything without you even knowing.
Main points for me? 1 - I'm becoming increasingly wary of software-as-a-service - how can you get true accountability? Do I think that the individual made this unauthorised (by us at least) change has had the error of his or her ways creafully pointed out? Have they learned from it? 2 - I want want some money back - I'll let you know how I get on.
